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Contemporary issues of art production, social justice and public engagement will confront urgent questions in Scandinavia on migration, nationalism, surveillance and public space, when the Creative Time Summit 2014 unfolds in the midst of the Nordic welfare states, Stockholm. An interview with the two curatorial parties: Chief Curator Nato Thompson from Creative Time and director of the Swedish Public Art Agency Magdalena Malm.

Creative Time is a nonprofit public arts organisation in New York, that has been around since 1972, presenting some of the most innovative and challenging art projects in the public realm. Thousands of artists and over 300 projects later the field of public art practices engaged in social issues is now well known and regarded in the US.

One of the paths has been commissioned art works in partnerships with a variety of well-known cultural institutions and community groups in contexts such as the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage, Times Square, Rockefeller Center, Governors Island, and the High Line, to neglected urban sites including the Lower East Side’s historic Essex Street Market, Coney Island, and New Orleans’s Lower 9th Ward. Another has been the extensive and expansive presentation and production of ambitious art projects that have underlined the public space as a space of reflection, imagination and negotiation.

Dialogue and legitimization

The public awareness and acknowledgement of this field of art practices has been a long struggle. One of the ways to legitimize these art practices was the making of a public platform and event that could bring together both artists, cultural and poltical stakeholders in a meaningful dialogue: The Creative Time Summit. Subtly referring to the political power structure and the annual meetings and negotiations among the few world leaders gated from the public.

The Creative Time Summit is definitely another story. Nato Thompson: ‘When the summit began in 2009 I was hoping to inject the political form of art making into the New York art scene, that I saw everywhere, but wasn’t present in any of the museums. It was in some way a hidden world of cultural production that was deeply interdisciplinary, in the world, trying to produce structures that were not just about criticism but about production, about making solutions. They should not be afraid of the complexities of politics and publics and of paradox, contradiction and political economies.

‘The summit was a way to legitimate this as a form of art making, and to be able to legitimate I had to put famous people next to unfamous people in one room. So you would get your established artists, your curatorial profiles, and you would get this obscure, unknown anarchist collective up there. And then you give them the same amount of time in the attempt of producing a non-hierarchical plane of legitimization. That was the initial task, and it worked! Five years later this field is very known in this city. So the task is quite different at this point.

By moving the summit to Stockholm, we wanted to get out of the United States for our own learning.’ On November 14-15 Stockholm and the Swedish Public Art Agency will collaboratively examine artistic and social issues with Creative Time.

Magdalena Malm, Director of the Swedish Art Council and Public Art Agency explains the background and her intentions of bringing the summit to Stockholm: ‘Following challenges of nomadism, mediated realities and globalisation, at this moment in time, we see an increased interest from artist in social and political issues. Creative Time has for a long time been the leading organisation in exploring this field, with a core focus in their Summit.

‘Since I started as director of Statens konstråd two years ago I have been aiming at re-defining the traditional notion of public art and allow it to embrace all practices where artists themselves act in, or relate to, public space. I met Nato in New York, and as my background is in the independent scene of expanded public practice, we found a common ground for a collaboration.’

In New York, Creative Time has been quite succesful inside as well as outside of the art world. There is also a lot of interest from government entities and non-art spheres concerning questions of civic responsibility.

Nato Thompson: ‘I think, when I started talking with Magdalena Malm, that was the opportunity she was interested in for Stockholm too. She wants to introduce the city, both on an artistic level, the art scene, and also on a governmental apparatus level – to different ways of thinking about cultural production in urbanism.’

The age of xenophobia

The two-day programme of the summit has two overarching agendas: One, is to introduce a broad spectre of artistic practices and the way of working in the public sphere, on a civic level, within the interdisciplinary field, in politics, aesthetics and sociality. A no-bullshit part, where the practical matter is in focus. This introduction is central to the summit. The other, is to present contemporary and urgent political issues that work as thematic frames of these practices: Nationalisms, Performing the City, Activating Public Space, Art in the Age of Surveillance and Migrations.

Thompson: ‘Nationalism, migration and surveillance is inspired by the rise of xenophobia throughout Europe. These movements and the nationalist, fascist tendencies that accompany them are a reason of concern, not just in a historical context, it also requires some considerations within the political field on EU and the role of the political left. Scandinavia is in many ways considered as a last holdout of the social democratic system, which seems in some ways eroding, so now the question is: Is this the direction it wants to go? There is a political question at stake here, and either the themes of the summit are very much related to that question. And these subjects are very different in the context of the United States. We have very different political, governmental structures. We live in a place that pretends it is capitalist, but secretly takes all our tax money and puts it all into the military and then goes bombing everybody! I don’t mean to smile, I can’t stand it, but that’s just how we are.’ Thompson almost yells. But then his voice suddenly changes, soft pitched, gentle: ‘Whereas you guys have a social democratic country that to some degree hasn’t quite got its head around immigration that well. It’s really wrestling with the national identity and the questions of, who is a Swede? These questions are really hard to figure out in general.’

He continues: ‘Artists as activits are not playing an insignificant role in the American and global political context. For example Laura Poitras, has been a very central figure in the narrative around the whole Edward Snowden story being the bridging contact to The Guardian. This is mirrored in a Nordic context where there’s a huge amount of activists working directly with the freedom of the internet. These projects, hacker movements, working with open source, are extremely important to us all and not small movements. The internet is not a small part of our world. The Nordic context and activists have been really important in those discussions.’

Global urgency and the needs of translation

Placing these urgent questions within the programme of the summit and presenting artistic projects in direct response is a clear way of highlighting how these means of artistic production are dealing directly with these questions around us.

‘A lot of artists of today are not even interested in doing great art works as much as they are interested in using the tools they have to address the world we are in. There is a larger political and social goal that they are invested in, than petting their own ego. And I think that kind of urgency is really valuable within this, because culture is the language we speak, globally, and culture is manipulated all around us. We are very familiar with cultural representations as a device of power. So it’s quite natural that art is the way in which we engage in politics by now. Every form of power has a PR department for a reason, a design department, a marketing department. Those are departments of the symbolic and are hugely important parts of ‘the machine of power.’

‘By moving these questions to another part of the world, we are also addressing the commonness of these questions, that they’re not just your problems or our problems.’

Magdalena Malm adds from Stockholm: ‘To bring the Creative Time Summit to Stockholm is a great way to collide the Scandinavian tradition of permanent public art with the independent tradition of artists engaging with public space and its social and political implications. The collaboration is in itself also a large project of translation. Such a simple thing as describing the map ranging from Istanbul to Vietnam, or from the States to Australia, shows that we are always the centre of our own map. To challenge this notion in a globalised situation is necessary and greatly enjoyable.’

Matthias Hvass Borello is the co-founder and editor of kunsten.nu (DK) and currently curator in residence at Flux Factory New York

All images courtesy Creative Time New York